Monday, December 24, 2018
It has been a terrible holiday season for Donald Trump. He's facing multiple criminal investigations, he's losing cabinet members and he even lost the House. While he was busy tweeting his emotions over the weekend about SNL and Michael Cohen's sentencing, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and senior advisor Stephen Miller
Friday, December 21, 2018
Monday, December 17, 2018
Russia’s Helped Trump Report States
Russia’s plot to wield social media sites to divide Americans and aid Donald Trump in the 2016 election was even more massive and sophisticated than previously understood, and efforts to disseminate disruptive messages continue.
Those are the findings of two independent groups of researchers tasked by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee.
The reports, released Monday, concluded that posts from fake Russian accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube led to more than 300 million engagements between 2015 and 2017. Among the groups most heavily targeted by the Russians: African-Americans.
The researchers found a cross-platform effort to target black Americans, often with memes about police brutality, and later feeding them voter suppression messages.
Among the narratives shared with black audiences was a meme "I WON’T VOTE, WILL YOU?" Another said "Everybody SUCKS, We’re Screwed 2016." Others urged votes for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.
“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party -- and specifically, Donald Trump,” wrote researchers at the University of Oxford and Graphika, a company that analyzes social networks. Right-wing voters were encouraged to support Trump, while left-wing groups were “provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage members from voting.”
Those are the findings of two independent groups of researchers tasked by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee.
The reports, released Monday, concluded that posts from fake Russian accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube led to more than 300 million engagements between 2015 and 2017. Among the groups most heavily targeted by the Russians: African-Americans.
The researchers found a cross-platform effort to target black Americans, often with memes about police brutality, and later feeding them voter suppression messages.
Among the narratives shared with black audiences was a meme "I WON’T VOTE, WILL YOU?" Another said "Everybody SUCKS, We’re Screwed 2016." Others urged votes for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.
“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party -- and specifically, Donald Trump,” wrote researchers at the University of Oxford and Graphika, a company that analyzes social networks. Right-wing voters were encouraged to support Trump, while left-wing groups were “provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage members from voting.”
The findings criticized social media companies for publicly minimizing the use of their platforms -- and for not sharing key data, such as the many comments generated as well as the posts’ metadata, so they could better judge the impact.
“It appears that the platforms may have misrepresented or evaded in some of their statements to Congress,” researchers from New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company, wrote. “It is unclear whether these answers were the result of faulty or lacking analysis, or a more deliberate evasion.”
Researchers for the two teams analyzed more than 10 million Twitter posts from thousands of Russian fake accounts, more than 116,000 posts on Instagram and 61,000 on Facebook and more than 1,000 YouTube videos.
Facebook said it cooperated with the Senate Intelligence Committee by providing thousands of ads and other content and took steps to prevent voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms.
A Twitter spokesman said the company was focused on improving the public conversation on its platform and that protecting the integrity of elections was an important aspect of that mission. The company has made strides since 2016 in that regard, including by releasing data to enable independent research of election manipulation, the spokesman said.
Saturday, December 1, 2018
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